Video Gamers as Writers – Twitching Our Way Into Character
Some writers hone their skills by a mix of soaking up lessons from the masters and researching specifics, from history to sentence structure. I’ve done all that… but one of my best tools is playing video games.
I’m a lifelong fan of role-playing games. I’ve written about that here once or twice, and the challenge of building a real story using a mix of other players and random die rolls. A campaign of D&D can do wonders for a writer’s eye for how different tastes merge, for adapting to the unexpected… making a story a lot like life.
But I’ve found there’s a different lesson in breaking out the PlayStation.
Mostly I play what are also billed as RPGs there; there’s no way I’d give up at least the feel of storytelling. Games like Final Fantasy and Mass Effect let me walk through a kind of Hero’s Journey, some with more richness than others. Where a tabletop game might let me build a story in shifts with time to appreciate my friends’ input, a console game is the simple pleasure of riding along in a story and helping the hero along… with simpler, non-creative help like how to shoot and when to check up on supplies. The fun of playing a part in the tale, without any pressure to write it.
–Alright, until a certain killer demon starts teleporting in and crushing me with one hit if I don’t dodge perfectly…
The thing is, it’s that simple “game” challenge where my PS has taught me the most about writing.
Most games might be only a joystick test wrapped up in the rough shape of a story. But that means there’s at least a hint of someone’s head to get into… and a whole game system to express what walking in his shoes might mean.
Fight Like a (Mage) Girl
One of the best times I’ve had was in Dragon Age: Origins, opening with the customized background adventure for a mage. A young wizard raised apart from society so as not to endanger them, and then her masters toss her into the demon-world to test if she can withstand their temptations? My character started to feel like a powerful but frightened girl, who used her initial spells of Slow and Flame in a frantic attempt to keep the demons AWAY until she could burn them down.
That was the key. For the rest of the grand Dragon Age storyline, I was able to look at Neria as a study in fear and slow-won confidence, and see how that led her master to protection and weakness spells rather than going for the kill. Or, how impressed she’d be with the rebel witch Morrigan as a teammate, who could teach her to wade into battle herself as a bear or bigger, If she was ready for it.
I still consider DAO the best epic adventure ever set to disk (discovering The Joining… or that mad voice in the tunnels calling “That’s why they hate us, that’s why they need us…”). But the finest edge of that pleasure was in letting those simple how-to choices show me what it’s like to be Neria.
One Giant Leap
Or today? Media tie-in games are usually a disappointment… actually they’ve all disappointed me except the Batman Arkham games. –Come to think of it, this principle might be one thing they’re missing: even if a game can play like being Frodo, I already know how Frodo thinks, and a Tolkien game probably won’t give me enough different strategies to discover him in his actions anyway.
Anyway, I stay away from the tie-ins. But this one was Attack On Titan.
How am I supposed to resist a game that even brushes against that ani/manga’s savage storytelling? Even though this game’s very crude in its nods to the plotline it lumbers through, just to set up more and more of the same school of battlefield challenges, it’s become quite a guilty pleasure.
Because this time I know the characters… and yet there’s room to distinguish them because the battles give more than one option. Like:
- Eren Jaeger (hot-headed hero): I don’t play him on a mission unless I have time to cut down every Titan on the board, because there’s no way he’d leave one alive if he had a choice. Even the distress signals he might not notice until he killed any Titans nearby.
- Armin Arlet (budding strategist): he’ll go after every rescue he can, partly out of kindness but also because he’s the best at deploying reinforcements. And I can see him working his way up from small foes to the bigger multi-Titan brawls… feeling for the moment he’s built up the confidence to go for the scenario-closing kill.
- Mikasa Ackerman (stoic combat genius): As Mikasa I find I prefer targeting the bigger crowds of Titans, figuring the stragglers are what her less skilled teammates can pick off. And I rush for the final target as soon as it appears, because why waste time? (Assuming “protect Eren” isn’t actually in the scenario, otherwise boulder-sized heads are gonna roll.)
They’re simple choices that a game lays out for us, but the game gives us the ideal chance to explore them. And in that exploring, I remember: only some heroes charge in, or work in teams, or any other of a hundred shaded possibilities. It’s too easy to write a scene and let genre or a sense of the obvious pick the details of how a protagonist acts on his decisions.
“He just picks up the gun and shoots his way free”? Before you say that, try spending half an hour trying to play someone who’s offered a good, controllable pistol on one shelf, and a wrist-breaking Magnum on the other, and knows he’ll have to make that choice work based on how he sees a battlefield. Then try to feel just which twist of the fight will make him charge in, or fall back, or throw himself as a shield in front of his friends.
Or how he sees those friends, his goals, his triumphs and despairs. How he acts, down to the smallest detail.
It’s often said a writer should know how a character walks with his cane, breathes to savor the open air, and does his laundry. Gaming with my awareness open helps me build that feeling.
And it starts with how to kill giants. Not too shabby, no?
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